Avaya ATF Updates

sadly I couldn´t join the Avaya ATF Europe event this year that was taking place in Dublin 10th to 13th of May 2016. Thanks to the networking infrastructure forum member OfWolfAndMan who provided me the presentations of the ATF event. Many thanks for that. Avaya has come up with some interesting news , here are some points that looked interesting for me.

Hardware

Avaya has introduced the ERS4900 device family witch is the successor to the ERS4800 devices. Like in the VSP family the ERS4900 will share the same software code with the ERS5900 series. That make sense to me instead of developping multiple BOSS images you have a shared code base. That model has worked out great in the VSP family and gives also the nice benefit of feature parity from a code standpoint.

The VSP7200 is now available as a licensed 24port version. You will get the 48 Port hardware of the VSP7200 that is limited to 24 ports. For me that looks like the replacement for the VSP7000 that should be named ERS7000 because it was running the BOSS image. It had also the limitation that you couldn´t run L3 routing and SPB in parallel. The only caveat that I see here is that with the VSP7200 you loose the stacking capability.

Software

On the Software side the two new exciting features for me are DVR Distributed Virtual Routing and Port Mirroring for the SPB Fabric. DVR will bring the capability to run the L3 distributed across multiple Access Switches in a SPB fabric. With that you can go full L3 on the Top of The Rack Switches and eliminating the need that packets have to sent to a centralized L3 Gateway. It is addressing the fist hop redundancy and the L3 load balancing problem at the same time. So traffic that is needed to be routed between two devices that are connected on the same Access switch can now be routed locally on that device.

Port mirroring across the fabric is the other new feature that cached my attention. Often it was a problem on traditional networks to do port mirroring. With the capability to send the Mirrored port traffic to an ISID in the SPB fabric you can transport it to any access port in the fabric. That brings a lot of flexibility. It is also possible to send multiple port mirrors to one ISID or to have multiple receivers. That gives you everything you would like to have in TAB network. Because SPB brings native multicast support this is something that can run in the background and fits natively into the fabric.

If you want to know more about it listen to the Network Braodcast Storm Podcast Episode 06 in that we had a nice conversation about DVR and Port Mirroring for SPB fabrics with Roger Lapuh from Avaya.